Research@THEA (Technological Higher Education Association)
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Oat husk ashes as supplementary cementitious material
No full textSupplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) are recognized and utilized to minimize cement use; however, several waste sources now employed for partial cement replacement are under threat for changes in industrial production methods and local availability. As a result, alternative materials like agricultural residues are being investigated as SCMs, particularly for their pozzolanic potential as a source of amorphous silica. In this work, the pozzolanic potential of oat husk ashes is investigated
Living well at home - integrated care for older people in ireland
Get PDFIntroduction: An ageing global population has led to increased costs for health and social care delivery. This has created a move away from acute hospital to integrated care across and between the acute, primary and community health and social care systems. In Ireland, Sláintecare, the ten-year plan to reform healthcare, has co-produced, integrated, person-centred care embedded in its policies1. This research looks at what is important to the older person, their family/carers and, the health and social care practitioners on the pathway from hospital to home, enabling the older person to remain and be cared for at home.
Methods: On-line semi-structured interviews were undertaken with six clinicians involved in the care of older people plus two representatives of third sector organisations. The data was manually transcribed to gain a greater understanding of the content and context2. Analysis was completed through theoretical sampling and comparison. The findings informed a focus group of five older people, facilitating a conversation around what was important to them- in hospital to prepare for discharge; at discharge and, at home to enable them to stay well. Data was analysed for recurrent themes at each stage, compared to interview data and common themes extracted.
Results: Communication between disciplines and practitioners within and across the acute and community healthcare systems is important to the delivery of integrated, person-centred care. Timely relevant information and actively listening to the older person’s voice is crucial at all stages. In line with research by McCormack and McCance3, developing a culture of person-centred care, where all those delivering and receiving care are treated with respect and dignity is important at all levels of healthcare provision and across all organisations. Community is seen by all as important to enable and empower older people to age well at home. In Ireland’s Integrated Care Programme for Older People (ICPOP) the ‘Living Well at Home’ section is viewed as essential in caring for older people, particularly the social prescribing and facilitating social connections elements.
Conclusions: The ‘Living Well at Home’ section of ICPOP demonstrates an acceptance that health and social care are more than medical. Engagement with community supports is an important aspect of its delivery. Active listening and communication between and with stakeholders is an essential part of person-centred integrated care.
Implications: While funding for ICPOP has increased4 and the roll out accelerated, the ‘Living Well at Home’ section, acknowledged by all as essential, has not received the same consideration. To provide person-centred integrated care, as envisaged by the ICPOP this needs addressing.ye
Anomalous distributed traffic: detecting cyber security attacks amongst microservices using graph convolutional networks
Get PDFCurrently, microservices are trending as the most popular software application design architecture. Software organisations are also being targeted by more cyber-attacks every day and newer security measures are in high demand. One available measure is the application of anomaly detection, which is defined as the discovery of irregular or unusual activity that occurs to a greater or lesser degree than normal occurrences in a data series. In this paper, we continue existing work where various real-world cyber-attacks are executed against a running microservices application, and the application traffic is logged and returned in the form of distributed traces. A Diffusion Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network is used to model the set of distributed traces and learn the spatial and temporal dependencies of the application traffic. Subsequently, the model is used to make predictions for ongoing microservice activity and threshold-based anomaly detection is applied to detect irregular microservice activity indicating the presence of seeded cyber security attacks, or anomalies. The cyber-attacks used to evaluate this approach include a brute force attack, a batch registration of bot accounts and a distributed denial of service attack.ye
FYP: The Road To Self-Assessment
Get PDFThis active learning project is part of a development for
an online self-reflective and self-assessment assistive
technology enhanced learning tool designed for final
year project students within the Faculty of Business and
Humanities, LIT.
Summary of Teaching & Learning Context
Subject domain, group size, stage of programme (year 1, 2, 3,
4)
The inclusion of the Final Year Projects in Year 4 has been a
significant development in course provision that has altered
the learning landscape for all student learners over the past
number of years. Over all there are currently approximately
300 final year students within the faculty undertaking the FYP
module and within the module students chose from either a
research thesis or a business plan. Since the initial proposition
to examine the Final Year Project as an active learning
strategy with a solid contribution to teaching pedagogy
the authors have now initial research findings to share and
disseminate. Subsequently since the initial concept to
examine this research area we have pilot tested the third- and
fourth-year Faculty of Business & Humanities students from
across multiple subject areas. While not exhaustive as other
degree programme do exist, it resulted in 188 replies to our
survey spread across the marketing, enterprise, innovation
and applied social science discipline spectrum. For the first
ever we now have factual evidence of the final year project as
experienced by our undergraduates
Library Resources For Active Learning (Online Library Guide)
Get PDFThe Library guide, Library Resources for Active Learning
is aimed at academic staff, interested in accessing and
evaluating a range of recommended resources for the
development of learner-centred active learning initiatives in
their classrooms and beyond.
The guide aligns with the Library’s overall teaching and
learning strategy, which incorporates critical thinking, and is
based on the principles of information literacy - ‘a set of skills
and abilities which everyone needs to undertake information related tasks; for instance, how to discover, access, interpret,
analyse, manage, create, communicate, store and share
information’ (CILIP, 2018).
Drawing on The Compendium of Active Learning: strategies
for student engagement, Vol. 1 (Ryan, 2021), this guide
contains a definition of active learning, and looks at some
examples of educational theories, methods, and frameworks
in terms of putting active learning into practice.
The main focus of the guide is on providing listings of national
and international resources for active learning enthusiasts
and practitioners involved in teaching and assessment in
further and higher education. Links to the following types of
materials are provided:
• Books;
• eBooks;
• Online journals;
• Websites
• TED Talks
The correlation between sustainable plastic adoption and business sustainability in the food packaging sector
Get PDFIreland is producing the most plastic waste per person in Europe
(Statista Research Department, 2021). Approximately 40 % of all
plastic produced in Ireland goes to the food packaging sector
(EESC, 2020). In order to achieve goal 12 of the SDG’s, we must
transition from a linear to circular economy.
Research Questions
Methodology Pilot 1 Findings
Price/Value of SP
Employee Awareness
Effort Expectancy of SP
Intention to use SP Actual SP Use
Facilitating
Conditions Economic
Sustainability
Employee- Social
Sustainability in Plastics
Environmental
Sustainability in Plastics
Performance
Expectancy of SP
Plastic Circularity
Social influence
Branding of SP
The Correlation between Sustainable Plastic Adoption and Business
Sustainability in the Food Packaging Sector
Ms Alina Greene, Faculty of Business & Hospitality, Athlone Institute of Technology
Dr. Aisling Keenan Gaylard Faculty of Business & Hospitality, Athlone Institute of Technology,
Dr. Margaret Brennan Fournet, Materials Research Institute, Athlone Institute of Technology
Pilot 1: A random sample of 12 employees from the
hospitality, retail and food production and packaging
manufacture industries. Mixed Method approach was used.
Further Research
Pilot 2: A sample of 50 employees from one company in the
packaging manufacturing/ food production sector. An initial
quantitative study will be completed with potential for
follow up interviews. Results will be analysed using PLSSEM through SmartPLS.
RO1. To investigate whether social and environmental influence is a factor
for businesses when adopting sustainable plastics for food packaging
RO2. To investigate the level to which businesses trust their performance
and technical infrastructure for the development of sustainable food
packaging
RO3: To ascertain whether BioICEP effort expectancy is a factor for
businesses when adopting sustainable plastic for food packaging
RO4: To investigate the level to which businesses consider the price value
of developing sustainable plastic
42 %
Yes No
Does your Business currently
use sustainable plastic?
75 %
Do you consider your
workplace to be a sustainable
67% stated their workplace could do more in engaging employees in their
CSR/sustainable developments
This study uses a combination of
elements from the UTAUT (Venkatesh et
al., 2003), the TBL (Elkington, 1997) the
9R Framework (Rli, 2015) and the SET
(Homans, 1961
Roles of medicinal mushrooms as natural food dyes and dye-sensitised solar cells (DSSC): synergy of zero hunger and affordable energy for sustainable development
Get PDFIn 2015, approximately 195 countries agreed with the United Nations that by 2030, they
would work to make the world a better place. There would be synergies in accomplishing the
17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Synergy using a single sustainable resource is critical
to assist developing nations in achieving the SDGs as cost-effectively and efficiently possible. To
use fungal dye resources, we proposed a combination of the zero hunger and affordable energy
goals. Dyes are widely used in high-tech sectors, including food and energy. Natural dyes are more
environment-friendly than synthetic dyes and may have medicinal benefits. Fungi are a natural source
of dye that can be substituted for plants. For example, medicinal mushrooms offer a wide range of
safe organic dyes that may be produced instantly, inexpensively, and in large quantities. Meanwhile,
medicinal mushroom dyes may provide a less expensive choice for photovoltaic (PV) technology
due to their non-toxic and environmentally friendly qualities. This agenda thoroughly explains
the significance of pigments from medicinal mushrooms in culinary and solar PV applications. If
executed effectively, such a large, unwieldy and ambitious agenda may lead the world towards
inclusive and sustainable development.ye
Using teachers' judgments of quality to establish performance standards in technology education across schools, communities, and nations
Get PDFThe establishment and maintenance of national examination standards remains a serious issue for teachers and learners, whilst the levers of control remain firmly in the hands of Awarding Bodies and supervising politicians. Significantly, holistic assessment presents an agility and collective approach to establishing in the minds of teachers “what is of value” when determining the comparative evidence of pupil performance. It is argued in this paper that the collation of the comparative judgment process can initially identify and subsequently maintain standards of performance that can be defined on a cluster, regional or even national level. Much comparative judgment research centers on the formative benefits for learners, but here we place the focus on teachers operating in collaborative groups to establish standards within and beyond their own schools, and ultimately across the nation. We model a proof-of-concept research project. A rank is produced by the collective consensus of the participating teachers and used to simulate a definition of standard. Extrapolations are statistically modeled to demonstrate the potential for this approach to establishing a robust definition of national standards. But central to the process is what is going on in the minds of teachers as they make their judgements of quality. The research aims to draw out teachers’ constructs of quality; to make them explicit; to share them across classrooms and schools; and to empower teachers to debate and agree their standards across schools. This research brings to the fore the symbiotic relationship between teaching, learning and assessment.ye
A review of the valid methodological use of adaptive comparative judgement in technology education research
Get PDFThere is a continuing rise in studies examining the impact that adaptive comparative judgment (ACJ) can have on practice in technology education. This appears to stem from ACJ being seen to offer a solution to the difficulties faced in the assessment of designerly activity which is prominent in contemporary technology education internationally. Central research questions to date have focused on whether ACJ was feasible, reliable, and offered broad educational merit. With exploratory evidence indicating this to be the case, there is now a need to progress this research agenda in a more systematic fashion. To support this, a critical review of how ACJ has been used and studied in prior work was conducted. The findings are presented thematically and suggest the existence of internal validity threats in prior research, the need for a theoretical framework and the consideration of falsifiability, and the need to justify and make transparent methodological and analytical procedures. Research questions now of pertinent importance are presented, and it is envisioned that the observations made through this review will support the design of future inquiry.ye
Circles in the sea: annual courtship “torus” behaviour of basking sharks Cetorhinus maximus identified in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean
Get PDFGroups of basking sharks engaged in circling behaviour are rarely observed, and their function remains enigmatic in the absence of detailed observations. Here, underwater and aerial video recordings of multiple circling groups of basking sharks during late summer (August and September 2016–2021) in the eastern North Atlantic Ocean showed groups numbering between 6 and 23 non-feeding individuals of both sexes. Sharks swam slowly in a rotating “torus” (diameter range: 17–39 m), with individuals layered vertically from the surface to a maximum depth of 16 m. Within a torus, sharks engaged in close-following, echelon, close-flank approach or parallel-swimming behaviours. Measured shark total body lengths were 5.4–9.5 m (mean LT: 7.3 m ± 0.9 s.d.; median: 7.2 m, n = 27), overlapping known lengths of sexually mature males and females. Males possessed large claspers with abrasions that were also observed on female pectoral fins. Female body colouration was paler than that of males, similar to colour changes observed during courtship and mating in other shark species. Individuals associated with most other members rapidly (within minutes), indicating toroidal behaviours facilitate multiple interactions. Sharks interacted through fin–fin and fin–body contacts, rolling to expose the ventral surfaces to following sharks, and breaching behaviour. Toruses formed in late summer when feeding aggregations in zooplankton-rich thermal fronts switched to non-feeding following and circling behaviours. Collectively, the observations explain a courtship function for toruses. This study highlights northeast Atlantic coastal waters as a critical habitat supporting courtship reproductive behaviour of endangered basking sharks, the first such habitat identified for this species globally. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i2H1wVOmb4)ye